Archive

Last December, we began rolling out a brand new user interface for Fire TV that puts your content front and center for customers. Customer reaction to the new UI has been overwhelmingly positive, and we continue to innovate to bring new ways to drive deeper engagement with your apps and games.

In an upcoming release, the Fire TV home screen will have a new row called “Recommended By Your Apps.” This row will show content recommendations that your app sends, assuming the customer has your app installed and opened it at least once. Recommendations on the Fire TV home screen will promote deeper engagement and loyalty for your apps.

How do recommendations work?

Recommendations allow locally-installed apps to display recommendation cards for their content on a dedicated row, so that you can take users back into your app with ease.

Amazon’s recommendations use the standard Android ContentRecommendation.Builder API. As a developer, you have a lot of control over the way the recommendation looks, with customizable attributes such as the recommendation title, description of the recommended content, recommendation image, and more.

In addition to using the common methods available from the standard Android recommendations API, you can incorporate enhancements that are Amazon specific. These Amazon enhancements allow you to create recommendations that better integrate with Fire TV and provide a great experience to customers.

For example, through Amazon enhancements, you can customize the text that appears in the launch menu when users select a recommendation card and click the menu button:

Enabling your content recommendations

Take a look at our in-depth documentation for exact steps to make your content recommendations appear on the Recommendations row.

For the Recommendations row to appear on a customer’s Fire TV home screen, there must be at least five recommendations in total sent from all apps. Additionally, the customer must not have any viewing restrictions set under Settings > Preferences > Parental Controls.

When thinking about what to recommend, remember to keep the content relevant to the user. Some things you can enable recommendations for include:

New episodes for shows watched earlier.

Encouragements to resume a show the user only partially watched.

Content similar to the shows the user has watched.

For more help with creating engaging recommendations, see the following documentation: